Monthly Archives: January 2013

Tardis on a payload, surely it was only a matter of time!

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Supporting the BBC’s Stargazing live programme, Carl from Stourbridge sent a Tardis into the stratosphere. Don’t worry about your licence fee though, the project was funded by Kickstarter. Read more in Oddbox

tardis

 

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How thick is the polystyrene in your payload box?

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Polystyrene foam thickness survey.

A couple of weeks ago I asked people to let me know how thick the polystyrene is in their payload. 11 people responded. Here are the results

a              30

b             20

c              50

d             30

e             30

f              27

g              25.38

h             25.4

i               30

j               12.5

k              38.3

average                      28.96

Styrofoam beer cooler

Styrofoam beer cooler

 

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HABHUB goes mobile

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The successful balloon predictor and burst calculator ( to name but a few of it’s functions) has gone mobile. It can be found at http://habitat.habhub.org/mobile-tracker/

habhubmobile

73, lz1dev says, “If you spot a bug or have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to open a ticket at https://github.com/rossengeorgiev/habitat-mobile-tracker/issues   ”

 

 

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The most expensive place to HAB in the world?

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Tomorrow, Trevor Cousins is helping a high school launch a HAB in Denmark.

http://skalsballoon.blogspot.dk/

Not only is it a tricky place to HAB given the long (north  – south)and thin shape of the country and the predominantly westerly wind, it also has to be the most expensive place. The Department for Transport manage permissions for balloon launches and they charge a hefty administration fee for processing balloon launch applications.

denmark balloon

Trevor said, ” Here in DK you have to get permission and the Department of Transport who give that charge 110GBP an hour for between 2 and 5 hours work. That is for 1 flight. Helium is about 4000kr for 3.6m3 (20L flask), so 450GBP. That is ballongas (balloon gas) and is 99% He. The expensive stuff is 1300GBP per 20L flask!”.

One way around the helium costs may be to buy the gas in Germany. There seems no way of avoiding the admin charge for launching in Denmark. If you know of a more expensive place to HAB then let us know.

 

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HAB outlook for 2013

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Here is a taster of what HAB groups round the world have planned for 2013

adamcudworth
I have quite a lot planned – hopefully this year will be my biggest ‘HABing’ year yet. Once I have got Uni exams over and done with (in a few weeks) I hope to carry out a couple of flights (Feb/March time).
Firstly there will be a flight dedicated to testing lots of equipment including my new tracking flight computer (just 3×3.5cm) – currently on it’s way over from China, cutdown modules, possibly a parachute deployment system and possibly solar charging. This flight will mostly be to test equipment out for the long planned ‘HABE Glider’ – the glider is being built currently and will require a whole array of new equipment to fly it successfully (hopefully). The actual HABE Glider first flight I hope will occur in the Summer – quite possibly in Spain! (As the UK CAA restrictions prevent it from being flown here).
Secondly, the HABE Lab will take to the skies sometime soon – I ideally still need more schools/people to get involved, so, when I get time I’ll be publicising it a bit more. That said, I have very keen interest from a few primary schools. It might be the case that the first ‘HABE Lab’ mission flies will less experiments than planned but hopefully will get some publicity so future flights can be filled up. I hope to get the HABE Lab flown around late Feb/March time.
alexei
I don’t currently have plans to do any launches, but I am working on the next web tracker together with Daniel Richman and Adam Greig to replace spacenear.us/tracker.
Cheers,
Alexei
Ing. Jonathan Remba Uribe XE1BRX xe1brx.remtronic.com
mexico
We are going to work on a new platform for this year and pretty soon, I think we’ll be launching on June maybe, we are working on the draft by now so I have very few details about the project, and as we are now working with a UNAM (Mexico City), TCN Systems (my company), CRAEG Club de Radio Amateur del Estado de Guanajuato (Radioclub), and several other hams. We are definitively launching this year.
Thanks a lot!
Flying Apple High school project, USA http://www.flyapple.org/

We are currently have a couple of projects we are working on. The first is an on-board flight computer and is something that a few of my students have been working on. It consists of a GPS antenna, which receives a signal from GPS satellites and then sends it to a microprocessor. The microprocessor is an Arduino board, which is widely available and fairly easy to integrate with other hardware. This computer takes the data that it receives from the flight, records it and runs an algorithm to determine and spits out a predicted landing spot for the payload. This landing prediction is then passed on to an APRS beacon which broadcasts the prediction as a packet. It is a pretty slick device and designed, built and tested by my students and other members of the club. Although the computer is still in the testing phases, we have had definite success with the programming and hardware integration. We have flown it on two flights so far and I hope we will be able to perfect it over the coming semester.

The second major project we are working on utilizes a piece of equipment that we had donated to our group. The device, called a flowmeter, measures the amount of gas that is being put into the balloon. It attaches between the Helium tank and the balloon filling tube and counts and totals the amount of gas as it passes into the balloon. We had been using weights to determine how much lift the balloon had. Once the balloon lifts the appropriate amount of weight, we let it go. Often times in the field, this is problematic. Any amount of wind and it becomes impossible to determine if the weights are being lifted by the balloon or by the wind. In order to get the most accurate rise velocities, it is important to be able to control exactly how much lift we are giving the balloon. Our goal is to use this new flowmeter is to be able to accurately control and measure the amount of gas we are putting in the balloon. Using this with an algorithm, we can figure out how much gas to put in the balloon to achieve the rise velocity we want. I don’t think any other groups have this piece of equipment.

Thanks,
Amanda

Beaufort High School, USA http://www.thetalon.smugmug.com/misc/space

banner

I’m a teacher in Beaufort, South Carolina. I teach computer graphics. A few years ago I was reading a photography forum and there was a post about the boys from MIT. That was the first I had ever heard of this kind of thing and I thought “I can do that.” It quickly changed to we can do that and I decided to make it a class project for my photography class.

The first flight was a 1,200g balloon. Sadly, we didn’t recover it. It came down in the middle of a dirt road and I think someone came on it before we did and thought “free camera…yea.” Since then, we have done six additional flight and recovered all of them.

We are planning an eighth but we have two things going against us:

1. We are right underneath the artic jet stream. What that means is, if you try and launch a balloon, be prepared to drive 100 to 200 miles to recover it…usually to the East.

2. We are on the Eastern coast of the Us. So that 100 to 200 miles… would put you out to sea.

These things can be overcome though…

1. The jet stream moves back up to the artic in the warmer months …so we just launch in the spring/summer months.

2. Drive West to launch.

Our next launch will be sometime in May. We are looking to send up a 1,500g Kaymont balloon, two GoPro cameras, a SPOT and an experimental ham aprs tracker. The aprs tracker is cool. It is a 100 mw transmitter. It runs off of a lithium 9v and has a built in data logger. It records every second of the flight…latitude, longitude and altitude. We used it on the last flight and it came back with 10,000 rows of data.

Todd Stowe

APEXHAB http://www.apexhab.org/

apex

We’re currently working on Apex Lumia and Apex Alpha II. Both of these

can be found on either our website or our GitHub.

Priyesh

University of California San Diego Near Space Balloon project https://sites.google.com/site/ucsdnearspaceballoon/

ucsd

We’re still getting everything ironed out, but we will be doing a few demonstration launches for student groups this year, and are thinking of flying some more floaters across the United States.
-Tim

Thorsten Klages Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt

ptb

My interest in HAB focuses on the science of Cosmic Radiation.  The other sides of HAB like Radio Tracking and so on are only the interest of the Radioamateurs in our Institute (PTB). We have a

cooperation with Germany’s National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Our next mission starts in June or July. This year I plan a Crossband Repeater and live images via SSTV / SSDV. The rest of Hardware is the old Base plattfrom, GPS /APRS /Voice, and Radiation detector.
Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt
Fachbereich 6.4
“Ionenbeschleuniger und Referenzstrahlungsfelder”
Bundesallee 100

Ben Longmier Project Aether http://www.projectaether.org/

project aether

We just finished up a big campaign with Invicta Watch Group (18 launches in one day), and a few other launches in the mid west (I’m now an assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering at University of Michigan).
We tried a floater launch recently with some success, attached.  We are retuning our equipment and are planning on trying some longer distance floaters this MLK weekend.
Trying to get back to Alaska and looking for sponsors to do so for some more aurora imaging and sensing work.
Project_Aether_floater_1
regards,
Ben
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Pilot Balloon Optical theodolite – the original balloon tracker

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The pilot balloon optical theodolite was the first device to ‘track’ pilot and weather balloons.

With the invention of the manned balloon in 1783 an urgent requirement for upper-level wind direction and speed developed.  The term pilot balloon appears to have been introduced by navigators of manned balloon when they adopted the practice of releasing small paper balloon before an ascent in order to determine the probable direction of flight.  On December 1, 1783, just before the ascent of the very first manned hydrogen balloon from Tuileries in Paris, a pilot balloon six feet in diameter was sent up.

WAVE Aerographer's Mate 3rd Class Dorothy J. Baroch stands ready to launch a weather balloon from a theodolite platform, circa 1944-45. N.A.S. Moffet Field California. Image from: Naval Historical Center

WAVE Aerographer’s Mate 3rd Class Dorothy J. Baroch stands ready to launch a weather balloon from a theodolite platform, circa 1944-45. N.A.S. Moffet Field California. Image from: Naval Historical Center

The first attempts at a rough determination of wind flow above ground level is believed to have been made in 1809 by Thomas Forster who observed the drift of small free (unteathered) balloons filled with “inflammable gas” and by Wallis who observed more than thirty balloons with a telescope, and found them to have very complicated paths, indicating multiple air currents. Read more…

The information comes courtesy of Martin Brenner

 

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